One Man's Trash

One man's trash is my boyfriend's treasure.

Seriously. No matter where we are, he picks up random stuff of the side of the road, in the parking lot, from the top of someone's trash. A long rod, some electronic device, a shoe...

"What are you going to do with that?" I demand.

He always shrugs. He'll fix it, he'll use it for something, he always insists. Especially if it's electronic. It baffles me that he honestly thinks he can fix anything. And maybe he can. But really, is it worth buying the wires and reconnecting and conjoining a personal CD player and spending weeks tinkering with it when one can just go to Target and spend the 20 bucks on it?

As I watch the walls of his room get cluttered with stuff, I am reminded of my friend's referral of the basement as her husband's "man cave". I think to myself, horrified, that maybe if my boy and I get married, we'll have to set up a basement, attic, and spare bedroom for him to tinker in.

Now, I'm not 100% immune. I had a phase, when I was 10 or 12 years old, where I kind of did the same. But I wanted to cut up everything, glue it to a posterboard, and call it "abstract art". It only took me a year to realize it was just crap.

Also, since I began designing jewelry, I keep coming up with outlandish ideas. My best friend has Bonnaroo bracelets from the last five years and I keep taking about cutting them up, and sewing them together with beads and hemp to make a kickass neckace. I want my nephew to write his name on a scrap of paper, so that I can roll the paper up and glue it to an acryic charm for a pendant. But the problem is, none of these ideas actually come to fruition. Either I get lazy or my visual images get fuzzy and it actually never really works out or I just don't get to it.

So maybe, just maybe, when my beloved starts enthusiastically rambling about how easy it is to refurbish that old electronic I would rather just throw away, maybe I should just smile instead of staring at him as if he's just grown another head. We have different ways of seeing things, and maybe if I encourage him, he'll encourage me to actually work with my hands a little more too.